Somewhere along the way, Ron Silliman and his fellow L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets earned the reputation for being heartless. In the absence of lines like “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” and without understanding the historical contexts to which L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E responds, it can be hard for the uninitiated to identify emotional elements. After all, a poetry movement concerned with human rights, poverty, and opposition to violence can’t be entirely without sentiment.

Although he hits as heavy with theory as his peers (cf. The New Sentence), Ron Silliman’s work, like Lyn Hejinian’s (My Life), is saturated with first-person narrative, love, and nostalgia, notably in works like Ketjak (1978), “Albany” (1981), and The Alphabet (2008). Revelatorfits within this strand of “slant” personal narrative.

A “revelator” is someone who reveals — in traditional uses, someone who reveals the word of God, specifically “John the Revelator,” who recorded the Book of Revelations. Due to the social context of his poetry, we can assume that Silliman is neither God nor God’s transcriptionist, but (as Gillian Welch’s revelator isn’t Blind Willie Johnson’s) something else, perhaps Ron himself, pictured on the front cover of the book reading Ketjak with a 1970s revelatory spirit, or perhaps, as Welch puts it, Time.

The jacket copy positions Revelator as “a poem of globalization and post-global poetics” that “addresses the problem that there are only two global systems: the biosphere and capital, while every response to these global systems is invariably local.” On the first page we get a hint of the political arena and the speaker’s desire for a total, but seemingly out of reach, reform:

… “Outsource Bush”Against which, insource what? Whowill do it? … (9)

And again shortly after, the speaker’s personal response to the dire political situation of Bush’s presidency, again with an underlying sense of the total failure of the system:

… at Monticello Ivery nearly wept, to imaginejust once the president asthe smartest, most questioning, mostrigorous of all … (13)

Amid Silliman’s panoply of motifs (bird-watching, taking the dog for a walk, aging) the cultural context of a global system where the “center cannot hold” emerges in descriptions of the war in Afghanistan, Fox News, Chipotle burritos, McMansions, and other contemporary economic and political references. The speaker’s mind, a tight fabric of many threads in close proximity, lets alternating images warp and weft, a concern for labor and markets freely woven with more personal thoughts: “peel cellophane / from a new tea carton / no indication where it’s grown / (Argentina!) no record no ____ / sense of the map” (32–33). Like Joyce and Zukofsky, Silliman uses the dense narrative to record himself as he records a specific moment in time and comments on its (sometimes overwhelming) social and political problems.

Again referring to the jacket for entry points, David Melnick calls the writing “friendly” while Roger Gilbert says it’s “fun,” and C. D. Wright goes along with the gag, using the term “witty.” I’ve never had a very good sense of humor, but I don’t find Revelator to be so carefree; I do find it to be warm, sympathetic, and humane. Consider the following passage, where at least four narrative threads converge:

for days the networks discover new amateur videos, waves far greater than one can imagine, on the beach bathers not even thinking to run, buses floating through streets of debris Banda Aceh, this week’s geography of the public imagination, Phuket’s stream of tourists washed away, bulldozers scooping corpses, our newscaster alone in an empty village, only the battered mosque remains, where are the people, how does this outer life, apocalypse reported, penetrate my dreams, three men on the street walking discussing who will reach 60 when, the way as teens we spoke of 20, not even seeing the homeless woman asleep beneath the newspaper racks at Mission & Fourth, fifth of bourbon warms, warns, passed between three beneath the bridge day is done, day is the ever-present challenge, wake or not, the painter Jess simply stays asleep. … (20–21)

The speaker watches the coverage of the 2004 tsunami; men who may or may not be the speaker and his friends discuss aging; a woman is homeless in a heavily traveled district of San Francisco but no one cares or even notices; three people of undetermined status share bourbon under a bridge; death; Jess, Robert Duncan’s partner, who died “of natural causes” (but not, as those in the South Asian tsunami, “of nature”). This passage has many motifs that appear elsewhere in Revelator: TV coverage of international disasters; the sense that the speaker is aging; an awareness of (and perhaps guilt about) extreme socioeconomic disparity; the threat of death; strong mental ties to the process of writing and to the literary community. The revelator is haunted by scenes of unnatural death, and often — in scenes where TV coverage speaks of American wars — personally haunted by his tacit responsibility for them. On the microscale, he’s aware of his own death and the mortality of his personal community. None of this seems particularly “fun” (Gilbert), but it does reflect a “desire to pull everything in” (Wright) and to let it flow forth in an open-mouthed tangle of record and revelation.

Time, which eats its own children, wants to pull everything in, and Silliman’s revelator fights back with the same weapon. From the most dear and personal to the anonymous televised global community, we are all mortal, and we all “rage against the dying of the light” quixotically: “I scream, you / scream, we all scream for / that which is unnamable, unquenchable, / inconsolable (deep in one’s chest / surrounding the heart) art is / a mode of stalking, balk / at any configuration, at what’s / inescapably omitted” (12–13). Silliman’s artistic desire to pull everything in, to mark it, to keep it against the threat of global and personal apocalypse, makes this a work of what Martin Hägglund calls “chronolibido”: “Poetry engages the desire for a mortal life that can always be lost.”[1] Silliman writes:

Dear Krishna, it’s 6:11 A.M. upstairs a faucet turns briefly Lilly is grown now, Alan’s hair thins at last, Melissa’s perfect smile still shines but no sign of Lulu, time erodes what’s dear, what’s near is past too soon to grasp fully the consequence, dawn threatens a new day constantly sun as vicious as dusk or rather simply uncaring, birds disinterested in the infant’s corpse, it’s language that introduces emotion or the other way round (23)

The revelatorhas multiple levels. He warns of the violence of global markets, war, environmental collapse, and socioeconomic inequality. He warns of personal apocalypses: deaths among his personal communities, marks of aging, and his own demise. These are godless revelations: we’re already in the apocalypse; there is no afterwards. “Revelator is the opening poem in a major sequence entitled Universe. It’s the jumping off point for a work that, if Ron Silliman were to live long enough, would take him three centuries to complete” (book jacket). We know Silliman cannot write the whole universe — but his intense desire to take a snapshot of our mortal lives, to “pull everything in,” provides a haunting, dense, breathless battle against Time “coming to take its breath away.”[2]

A review of 'A Jerome Rothenberg Reader'

Published by Black Widow Press as part of their Modern Poets Series, Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader interweaves poems with prose work in a grand collage,[1] proffering a vivid map through the intellectual and procedural frameworks of Rothenberg’s oeuvre. Eye of Witness traces a cogent, compelling narrative of an extraordinary and extraordinarily large, diverse body of work, synthesizing for us the poet’s mind at work across sixty years of poetic endeavor.

A feast and a surfeit, this collection, edited by Heriberto Yépez and Rothenberg in collaboration, tracks Rothenberg’s work along with the evolution of the poet’s sense of his project. Eye of Witness’s braided timeline, layering old with new, first insights and later renewals and revisions, conveys to us a poet-navigator, always looking to the future, his boat drawn with him, a vessel deep-loaded with the riches of the past, provoking for us the experience of the fabulous within the mundane ground of the living world. Eye of Witnesschallenges the reader to question how might we, beautiful and terrible as we are, live in this beautiful and terrifying world — how does language return us to it and it to us? Affirming the potency of the other-than-human world to human understanding and experience, Rothenberg asserts “the poet’s work may, like the shaman’s, make its encounter foremost within language — may start with language and use that as a vehicle with which to drive toward meaning, toward a (re)uniting with the world’” (Rothenberg citing Eliade, 171).

In his introduction, Heriberto Yépez provides valuable insights into the long and complex evolution of Rothenberg’s poetics, tracking the move Rothenberg makes from Deep Imagist to shaman-as-poet, to trickster as generative mythos, and ultimately, to the figure of witness, this long process invested in what Yépez terms “a call for the simultaneous renewal of cultural forms and a reconfiguration of consciousness, a matter of making new cultural and spiritual constellations available” (19). Yépez further asserts: “Rothenberg’s witness is the marker of a new kind of poet — its pre-face — in which two apparently opposite drives coexist: an acknowledgment of poetry as a perpetual and radical change of form — and thus the willingness to not retain any-thing — and a desire to construct a total poetics, or — to use a recent word of Rothenberg’s — an omnipoetics: to say in every form possible what cannot possibly be said” (23). Indeed it is the witness to which this book owes its title, a witness who “still belongs to the oneiric dreamworld but is plagued by the human capacity for cruelty” (22). This collection of Rothenberg’s work vividly illustrates, across a multiplicity of genera and forms, the revelations of the dreamworld, what it teaches us about the human capacities for beauty and horror, and the collateral wonders and terrors our human capacities provoke.

While Yépez tracks a journey or evolution, Rothenberg’s intention in the collection is to “assert a wholeness in the work” (24); both of these insights are manifest in the gathering. Rothenberg and Yépez weave newer poetry with older prose, and vice versa, as well as layering into the mix performance pieces, plays, sound work, translations, variations, and extensions. The proses themselves are diverse, including letters, manifestos, lectures, a response to Harold Bloom’s critical apparatus, prefaces and postfaces from Rothenberg’s books, et cetera. Throughout the collection, Rothenberg asserts the collaborative/collective nature of poetry, “an exploration of what our poetry could be — what we could make it to be — as an art of sound and gesture” (26). Rothenberg positions his translations and total translations, his variations, texts for performance, and his plays, as integral to his “pursuit of a kind of transcultural or global poetics, rooted in place but capable of crossing borders and languages to become a virtual omnipoetics” (26). Rothenberg conceives (his) poetry as a collaborative venture with other poets and language workers, translation as a process resulting in new texts, in which “discovery at every point I meet the poem” (56) is operant. In keeping with that aesthetic and ethical modus operandi, Eye of Witness juxtaposes excerpts from 50 Caprichos After Goya withvariations on Octavio Paz’s “Blanco,” a translation of Picasso’s “The Dream & Lie of Franco,” and translations of two of Tzara’s Dada poems (“A Book of Otherings”); or later, excerpts from a prepared talk on the poetics of the sacred, meditations on ethnopoetics, and an essay, “Primitive & Modern: Intersections & Analogies,” with a discussion of the relation between poets and the trickster figure (included in “Poetics & Polemics 1: Toward an Ethnopoetics”). In “A Book of Extensions,” translations from Seneca songs stand shoulder to shoulder with Rothenberg’s collaborations with visual artists (Tom Phillips, Susan Bee), his photo-text collages, his play “Esther K Comes To America: 1931” a series of verbal translations of events and rituals, and excerpts from his collection That Dada Strain in which Dada and jazz both serve as instigations. Much like the anthologies for which Rothenberg is renowned, Eye of Witness is structured as assemblage and collage, lending to anthology the same attentions given to the making of poetry.

Organized into three “Galleries” and three “Poetics & Polemics” sections, as well as “A Book of Otherings,” “A Book of Extensions,” and “New Poems: Divagations & Autovariations,” Eye of Witness takes its reader from early translations from German and Rothenberg’s originatory work with Deep Image through his translations of Native American traditional texts and the formulation and extension of Ethnopoetics to his secular (re)encounters with Jewish mystical traditions and his European Jewish heritage, the aftermath of the Holocaust and the possibility for and requirements of a poetry post-Holocaust (the fundamental function of the poet as witness),[2] and into the vision of an omnipoetics in which the “challenge of a poetry & a counterpoetics is as much needed as ever”:

the matter of the revolutions of the word & how they might exist today … the internet, the web, offers a new arena for visual, performative, & interactive modes, moving (sometimes at least) in multiple cultural directions. The number of such websites & displays is in fact enormous, so that watching the experimental work already triggered — the technical ease in its construction — there’s a sense, isn’t there, of a futurism that has come into its future … what I’ve more recently come to call an omnipoetics. (547–48)

What stands out to this reader? So much that I may only hint at the astonishing riches awaiting Eye of Witness’sreaders. For the world of familial and cultural origin — that vexed place of hunger and poverty, of otherness and oppression, of war and ruin, demons and executioners — an excerpt from “The Wedding” (Poland/1931):this music, this urgency, this terror.

Or Rothenberg’s “Cokboy,” a punning, musical, and satiric mashup of the disparate elements of the American mythos: a wandering Jewish mystic in the American wilderness (the “wild” west), speaking with a Yiddish accent in nonsense vocables and plain English among a heterodox company, including the Baal Shem (later reborn as a beaver, Rothenberg’s Seneca totem lineage), cowboys like “the financially crazed Buffalo Bill,” Custer, and Barry Goldwater (“a little christian schmuck”), Native Americans, “Polacks,” the Cuna nele, prospectors, Anglo Saxons, and Lao Tzu all in kabbalistic time “like Moses in the Rockies,” until like any storyteller, Rothenberg winds down his tale into silence from within which we ponder this “America disaster”:

I will fight my way past you who guard the sacred borderlast frontier village of my dreamswith shootouts tyrannies(he cries) who had escaped the lawor brought it with himhow vass I lost tzu get herewas lucklesson a mountain & kept fromtrue entry to the west true paradiselike Moses in the Rockies who stares at California spooky in the jewish lightof horns atop my head great orange freeways of the mindAmerica disasterAmerica disasterAmerica disasterAmerica disasterwhere he can watch the sun go downin desertCokboy asleep (they ask)only his beard has left himlike his own his grandfather’sghost of Ishi was waiting on the crestlooked like a jewbut silentwas silent in Americaguess I got nothing left to say (242)[3]

Or Rothenberg’s polemic of a visionary and revolutionary poetics posited against Harold Bloom’s privileging of repression over freedom, challenging that critic’s “Scene of Instruction, which is necessarily also a scene of authority and priority” in which “the true poem is the critic’s mind” and all poetry reducible to “the inescapable anxieties of competition” (405, 402, all quoting Bloom), a system of “mis-reading [and] deception” (405) in defense of a canon “European … post-Enlightenment & English” (406). To which Rothenberg incisively and rigorously responds:

But we know, after all, who threatens us. We know who reminds us of how 'heavy' our 'inheritance' is; who tells us not to deign to be good readers of our own poems or to think that we can write at all 'after the deluge'; who enters in Milton’s Shadow — & 'not the Romantic return of the repressed Milton' but the Puritan Milton of repression. And we know who proposes the discontinuities between poets & rejects those who might know their lineage too well. We know who thinks that he 'can block a new voice from entering the Poet’s Paradise' or who would presume 'to help decide a question that is ultimately of sad importance: ‘Who shall live?’'(416)

Rothenberg asserts that it is not Blake’s “Devourer” (here Bloom) but Blake’s “Prolific,” the poet of “the unqualified ‘freedom’ of the Romantics & their successors” (403), “the forwardness that has again & again defined an avant-garde over the last two centuries” (406). Rothenberg asserts, “The game, in short, is up … [and Bloom doomed to his own summation of the Cherub’s fate]: ‘He cannot strangle the imagination, for nothing can do that, and he in any case is too weak to strangle anything’” (416).

Or the astonishing beauty and terror of “Fourteen Stations,” Rothenberg’s responses to Arie Galles’s monumental charcoal drawings of aerial views of the Nazi concentration camps and the horrors they represent: “Fourteen Stations”/“Hey Yud Dalet.” The poems are composed by means of a procedure using Gematria counts from “the Hebrew and/or Yiddish spelling of the camp names … keyed to the numerical values of Hebrew words and word combinations in the first five books of the Bible … not so much to mask feeling or meaning as allow it to emerge” (433):

Or this total translation from the oral to the page as concrete poetry, work done in collaboration with Richard Johnny John: “Songs From The Society of The Mystic Animals” of the Seneca (323).

As vivid as this translation is, his performance of it is something else entirely, returning to it music and rhythm, the breath of the body, and the sound of the rattle: both the visual and performed versions transforming our understandings of poetry.

And finally, I offer the reader, from “A Poem of Miracles,” this “Coda,” dedicated to Diane Rothenberg:

Here, what has always glowed so warmly in the heterodox and radically revolutionary work of Rothenberg, is a deep humanity and love.

For the reader who has yet to encounter Jerome Rothenberg’s work, Eye of Witness offers a wide-ranging entre into his rich and omnifarious oeuvre, a vital space of revelation for lovers of language and poetry. For the reader already familiar with Rothenberg’s phenomenal endeavors, Eye of Witness affords synthesis and a retrospective view of his writing’s evolution, delivering a clear sense of the wholeness of that diverse, multiform work and its generative impulses and sources, the work of one of the great minds and poets of our time, perhaps of all time. An homage to an extraordinary language worker, a poet dedicated to the renewal of language and of our encounter with the world, Eye of Witness is itself an extraordinary document and an essential companion for poets and critics seeking an understanding not only of Rothenberg’s work but of the progress of visionary language work from ancient times to the present as it has unfolded via recuperation, discovery, and (re)invention from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, a poetry Baedekker for us all. Kol ha kavod, Jerome Rothenberg and Heriberto Yépez!

1. Rothenberg’s term for “the life of poetry.”

2. “I am a witness like everyone else to [the world, the present, as it comes and goes], and all the experiments [the poems] for me … are steps toward the recovery/discovery of a language for that witnessing” (391).

3. Listen to PennSound recordings of Rothenberg reading part 1 and part 2 of “Cokboy.”

Little discourse exists today, at either pole of high literary theory or pop discourse, that narrativizes the bond between the individual writer and the reader in poetry or fiction, other than metaphors of the “literary market” as a collective purchasing power or critical arbiter of taste. The death of the author coincided with the birth (and, some would argue, tyranny, in reader-response criticism, blog, and spectator culture) of the reader as a determinant of value and meaning.This is modernity’s grand narrative of failed representation (of war, and the “nothing that is not there, / and the nothing that is”: the horror vacui of the man, or a generation of men and women, without qualities), in what Marshall McLuhan declared to be our postliterate culture, wherein the author has been lowered from the status of sacerdotal epistemological subject (one who knows, and who disseminates knowledge), to a bureaucratic mouthpiece carrying out her author-function, to a ghostwriter of forms (canonical, extracanonical, or undecided).

The most well-known interpolation of a reader in nineteenth-century literature is “Reader, I married him,” from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Roland Barthes’s The Lover’s Discourse (1978) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1988), and other essays by Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray constitute a few cornerstones in the textual hermeneutics, instantiated by Roland Barthes, of both écriture (writing about writing) and écriture feminine (the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text), as well as theories of the lyric, narrative, personhood, and body politics. Choosing between the assembly and gleeful dismemberment of a purely citational, web-derived textual “body” (Flarf) or a version of Homeric mimesis (e.g., Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, wherein he transcribes mass media’s ideology rather than poetic tradition) takes the questions of agency, intentionality, and framing (for writer or reader) and turns them into questions of proprietorship (intellectual property and copyright or droit moral): a swift divagation from the epistemological and ontological questions that haunted the modernists, from Sartre’s “What Is Literature?” to the question of whether a “poem” is defined or judged by its constitutive elements (its material body as expressed in syntax and line, meter and rhythm), its function (how it “works”), or its telos (was it “intended,” and if so, for whom). Writing to one’s audience is a doubled-edged sword. While pandering to the masses can be a means of survival at the cost of authenticity, limiting one’s projected readership to those schooled in academic jargon or in the parlance of an elitist (pop or hipster) coterie can also be forms of false consciousness.

New Narrative writers mark the gulf between readerly intimacy and direct interpolation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and today’s habitus of authorial onanism as a symptom of capitalist alienation, and also as its source. One New Narrative writer is Renee Gladman, a professor at Brown University (school of experimental aesthetics). The author of A Picture-Feeling (2005) and several works of fiction, including Event Factory (2010), The Activist (2003), Juice (2000), and Arlem (1994), Gladman tests the potential of the sentence with the cartographic precision and curiosity endemic to the New Narrativists, whose work is framed in spatial rather than stylistic terms. Gladman’s work, and the work of other New Narrativists (Kathy Acker, Camille Roy, Michelle Tea, Eileen Myles, Laurie Weeks), borrows more from new performance theories than from narrative theories (Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser), most of which insist on separating art from aesthetics, or operating within a performative frame rather than conflating form with content. A productive, Brechtian sense of the alienation effect is different from the totalized spectacle: the formal and real subsumption of aesthetics under capitalism and performance, anesthetizing emotion and the participatory real. In the words of Walter Benjamin: “We will arrive at a moment of sufficient self-alienation where we can contemplate our own destruction [as a species] as in a static spectacle.”

Richard Hornby’s antiperformative “metadrama” and other neorealist art theories that deny the performative aspect of personae, or the frame, populate contemporary art in pop and academic circles. The neoliberal subject has been split into the spectacle itself (a ticketed event, or occupied site, rather than a commodified subject), and an observer of and in spectator culture, passively watching the made-for-TV sitcom/soap opera/reality show not only of other event-sites. Gladman’s Event Factory (the first novel of The Ravickians, a series taking place in a fictional city in an invented language) as the new psychological novel? Hardly.

Beyond postmodern formalism lies connectivity (or the abandoned dream thereof): Gladman distrusts the power of authorial language to uphold meaning for a reader (the stabilization of a signifying code, allowing for communication: language’s original “function”). Gladman invented not just words in The Ravickians but a language, Ravic, to “say what my voice would allow me to say,” and rid her voice of the “vowel presence” of Spanish and English: “With a name like Luswage Amini, syllables get pronounced the way a black Southerner speaks. It’s like Lu-SWAGGE, kind of slow, drawn-out … I think black people and Eastern Europeans should have a conversation about possible overlaps between their experience.”

Likening the communicative restraints of the English tongue to a stiffening body, Gladman suggests how communication is conscripted by not only logos, but the grammatology of the language in which we are speaking or writing: “the subject-verb-predicate order enforces a pattern. Having the body as an extra means of communication is one way of addressing that limitation, but the body still imposes another kind of order. You age and can’t communicate because you can’t spend three minutes in a backbend.”[1]

E. M. Forester’s panacea for modernist nausea and anomie(“only connect”) strikes the postmodern auteur as hopelessly naïve, yet narratives of isolated suffering and disconnection (heightened in cyber culture) dominate American media, as we arrive and depart, yet rarely connect, during travel, and only at a temporal remove in reading. The flexible labor of geographically mobile subjects (fully wired and easily transplanted) may adapt us to the workplace and urban living, but what is the “added value” (or hidden cost) of not connecting with a writer, or reader, or, in reading (or writing), failing to make connections or understand?

The lines between past and future, as well as cultural and racial fixities, dissolve from solid to liquid in Gladman’s story “Calamities,” a text whose armature is performance: “There’s this feeling that there is a community or interested parties who are reading these essays, because they are also junior faculty or are also living in lonely cities or also have a crazy idea, like that black people could be Eastern Europeans.”[2] The fetishization of aesthetics over labor, of capital over art, extends to the fetishization of the text: written language’s trace of presence rather than “real presence” of speech displaces the difference of the other, beginning with the authoritas denied God the Father and the narrator (Sartre’s dreams of totalized meaning) and ending in simulacra, or witnessing of the “untruth” of texts removed from structural laws (linearity, progression, meter, authorial intent, and time). “The truth of writing is the not-true,” as Alice Jardine says. “Writing is … the supplement in motion: liquid, inconsistent, imp-proper, non-identical to itself, it menaces all laws of purity.”[3] Including, apropos to Gladman’s work, the purity of genre and classificatory essentialisms regarding race, ethnicity, and other taxonomies of species and culture. Paradoxically, the supplemental trace marks of the absence of presence: lack rather than meaning as the condition of thought and experience, and self-alienation within representation (the written text) bearing the necessity of its own deconstruction and critique.

Whether the staged interiority of a monadic “I” is in conversation with an interiorized “Thou” (and, in the history of Greek drama, the collectivist, or royal, “we”) and is an a priori construction projected, as W. R. Johnson believed, for a reader, or whether the work of the lyric is the staging of that self, tempt questions of cultural representations of the graphic “sign” (mark, character) and the word, as differentiated from voice, and, in many Indo-European and Gallo-Romantic languages, the split between sign and referent. The “absence” of presence, attenuated in narratives wherein a new tongue is out of necessity invented, transcends the catch-22 of unrecognition or invisibility (lacking signification) or, risking speech, only to be reappropriated and resignified by canonical “authority” or a hegemonic race, class, or gender.

The trace, as an epitaph marking the lost object or memory, goes by several names in Jacques Derrida’s work (differance, arche-writing, pharmakon, specter): Derrida was also interested in the “gothic rhetorical effects” of encryption, paralysis, violation, and unspeakability, employed to “vex topological distinctions” through punning, and remains, since Plato, the most significant thinker on dialectic between the privileging of the text over orality. While it remains a mere supplement or index to presence, it “cuts” through the dream that there was an ontological presence, to which the infinite drift (the elided chain of signifiers not originating in or ending in a transcendent signified) refers. Language games, whether poetic or narrative, written or spoken, are speech acts, intention or not, with socially consequential and transferential implications: “I am listening” also means “Listen to me.” Or, as Jonathan Culler notes, a “work has structure and meaning because it is read in a particular way, because […] properties, latent in the object itself, are actualized by the theory of discourse applied to the latent act of reading.”[4]

Ironically, in today’s “New Narratives,” the building blocks of language, rather than communicative dialogue, perform a form of theatricality feigning indifference from an audience. This alienation is revealed in the paratactic “anti-cartography” of Gladman’s prose: at ease with dislocation, in rejection of totalized meaning and the responsibility of the auteur to serve as authority or guide. Gladman creates dense paratactic webs of relation, language, and plot, further complicating rather than streamlining or theorizing these contradictions (Barrett Watten’s Total Syntax, for example, nods to a patriarchal lineage of writers including Olson, Zukofsky, and Pound attempting to create a master-code or ur-text to embody language and its rule-sets to address the paradox of how language generates meaning, if meanings prismatic and in flux). Gladman’s writing process is one infinite drift, lacking formal closure or even dialogue: “I don’t have to end them … I would hope that through the accumulation of attempts to understand myself in particular experiences, maybe I would be something. That would be the self, an accumulation.”[5] Gladman’s disseminated speaker, sans self, thus laments: the map is missing, and even if we had one in our hands, would we follow it, even if being able to cognitively “map” our environment, personal history, or historical time?

For Gladman, epistemology is subject and site, as is the urban imaginary, or what Adrienne Rich calls the politic of location. The map figures largely in The Activist, a novel whose chapters include “Tour,” “The Bridge,” “Radicals Plan,” “Never Again Anywhere,” “White City I, and II,” driven by the question “Why is the map mutating?” and, later, despair (“The map has become everything to us, yet we can’t control it”). Capital’s liquidity is a literal metaphor for Gladman, who describes modern consciousness as a kind of freebasing on isolation, in “Juice”:

When my faith returned all my lovers were gone. That morning I woke to the two hundred and thirty-second day of the crisis; I was beneath my bed … lonely, but I was also sure. Life without juice had taken on the name and shape of my weakest character, who — when we passed on the street — did not know me. I knew it was me by the way my head felt: people find themselves in an idea and feel so specified by the idea that they are compelled to show it. Today all my ideas are liquid. That day of my faith, friends thinking I was sick came by … The juice on my mind was no longer juice. There was an absence there, but one so constant it became familiar. I did not want to drink it.[6]

Gladman’s anti-epic stance (a literal form of self- and other-leveling) expresses the body, and the denial of grand narrative’s distancing from temporality (and any perspectival judgment on one’s surroundings, based on a priori or theoretical “knowledge” distinct from, or as inextricable from, empirical experience). In this way, Gladman illustrates viscerally the inability to fully sever text from context, or form from content, questioning whether abstracted, reified, disembodied meaning (the decontextualizations of formalism and neoliberalism) can even be considered meaning, given the first order of alienation — representation — as such. “I was most interested in experience — how you obtain it, how you ‘capture’ it — but what led me to poetry rather than fiction, where experience is captured all the time, was a need to slow the whole thing down, to draw out the moments of experience, expose the gaps.”[7] In Event Factory (wherein an outsider struggles to physically orient herself in a city) and in The Ravickians (wherein a novelist struggles to represent that city), Gladman first sensitizes us to the politics of (mis-) translation before announcing the solution to mis- and un- recognition of otherness (the abject, foreign, or unassimilable subject into the maw of globalized English, and capitalism) to be the creation of a new, or forgotten, language: art, its forays into the unknown, outside of Hegelian sublation, market determinations and codified laws, a “language” immediately understood (i.e., in no need of pricing or translation) by a reader versed in encryption of truth. Metaphor incarnate, the trick mirror of potentiality as well as the actual weight, and worth, of relationships, the journey through sprawling mazes, of, and in, to life.

In Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, the first anthology of its kind, editors TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson have included a wide diversity of aesthetic and social perspectives. Poems by Jake Pam Dick, Aimee Herman, kari edwards, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, the two editors, and several others exhibit the kind of strategies — disjunction, linguistic play, disruption of syntax, and derangement of narrative flux — characteristic of innovative poets who, at least to some degree, have been influenced by Language Writing, aspects of the New York School, and the most experimentally inclined American surrealists, post-Objectivists, and Black Mountain poets. The late John Wieners, directly affiliated with Black Mountain, and Eileen Myles, a major second-generation New York School poet, appear in the anthology alongside newer poets. There is a spoken-word poet, Natro, and several poets who seem to have appropriated elements of Slam poetry. Among those who employ relatively direct narrative or meditative strategies are Amir Rabiyah, Ari Banias, Cole Krawitz, Duriel E. Harris, Ely Shipley, Fabian Romero, and Kit Yan.

Many contributors focus on the connections between language and sociopolitical power in both their poetics statements and their poems. Bo Luengsuraswat perceives “languages” as “violent” and declares, “You choose what type of harm you prefer to endure at different moments” and cites as an example the choice to “gender” rather “than being gendered by someone else” (84). Some contributors to the anthology seem to perceive definition as necessary, if problematic, whereas others see resistance to definition as most crucial.

In his lightly iambic, rhymed “So Let Am Not,” the widely know poetry critic Stephen Burt presents a male speaker who wistfully imagines an alternative life as the “flirty girl” he has “never been” (448) but is held back by being “of others, of / responsibilities” and finds the prospect of transition too daunting: “I do not want / to pull up roots, to build a new / high house amid imaginary trees” (449). This individual does not make a decision to choose “reality” over dream/appearance or visa-versa; there are different kinds of “dream” without a touchstone of reality: “So let yourself be / but know who you seem. / Know the difference / between a dream and a dream” (449). Note how the colloquial meaning of “be” — don’t change yourself — allows the poet to avoid establishing a hierarchy in which “being” is worthier than “seeming.” Regardless of biological origins, “seeming” is the important choice to make, and the speaker affirms the primacy of “seeming” over a problematically reifying “being” in the poem’s closure:

Let a man and a boy and a girl whose torso is a testament to metamorphosis tell their own tales but as for me I am not and I am not going to be. Thank you for listening. Once or twice I did come close. I was almost a flirty girl. (450)

In “Ready to Know,” a poem in which “all words” are “found in the June 2005 issue of Seventeen,” Joy Ladin imagines the commodity capitalist engine of the production of femininity casting its spell on a man transitioning into a woman and thus critiquing its advertising rhetoric:

Ready to know which girl you are? Find out while you shave your face and try to convince yourself

you can look great, hide tummy, enhance bust, find the best dress for your shape, exfoliate your past so gently

you won’t even feel the ambivalence that rocks your body, leshing out your future, adding curves to your shame. (303)

The ironic underside of Ladin’s uncanny tercets suggests that if the audience for this rhetoric buys the imperative to “say yes to the girl you see” (303), which offers her “up // to the goddess moving through / the guy [she has] been for years” (304), she will fall prey to what kari edwards in “a narrative of resistance” identifies as an “end-game” involving “the epiphany of late Capitalism” — that is, “to be the greatest consumer by buying one’s way into endless cycle of unexamined representations of the grand tale” (323). Even if the “‘I am this _____ (fill in the blank) and I am beautiful and sexy and fine and I am ok no matter what you say’ club” comprises a useful “first step in seeing one’s self other than a formless form situated in social shame,” it is an inadequate “stopping point” (323). Instead, edwards advocates leaning “towards deviation, migration, position shifting, slipping in and out of focus, […] try[ing] to find alliances that go in the same direction by a different track, corollaries that get lost in their own direction,” as “a tool for disruption, activism, acts of personal and public empowerment” (325).

Julian Talamantez Brolaski seconds edwards’s dicta about “disruption”: “Mimesis may be a typical response to the world, but it is the distortions that are provocative” (316), and so Brolaski “distorts” ordinary language in poems like “most honeyed” that shuffle dictions and spellings from different eras, use trans-discourse like the adjective “xir” (neither “her” nor “his”), derange syntax, put various words under erasure, vary spacing within a line, and include superscripted and subscripted parts of words. Here are the relatively “clear” concluding lines of “most honeyed”: “perhaps one does not / not want to be found unsupple in the main and unduly hided / that one ys most of all (the time) w/ oneself” (312).

For many of the poets in this volume, trans-self-identification is not determined by access to advanced medical technology that simply “corrects” the misalignment of the body into which one was born with one’s psychological identification with fixed, finite, “natural” properties of the other gender. Instead, as Peterson asserts, there is a desire for “a poetry with a connection to the biological, but a biological that relies upon neither ‘gender essentialism’ nor reproductive teleology as defining characteristics” (20). Peterson even parodies the limitations of the technology, which cannot always keep up with the vagaries of “the viewer’s perspective,” in “Trans Figures” through allusion to Genesis:

Let there be breasts! (and there were breasts) Let there be a penis! (and there was a penis) or at least it looked like it from the viewer’s perspective, under these clothes. If only it were slim, with wide hips! (and it was slim with wide hips) Let there be taffeta, muslin, silk, velvet, velour, or crinoline: and there were all these things, in abundance. (467–68)

Through the ironizing of this “lo and behold” exclamatory discourse, Peterson’s speaker implies concern about whether the construction of visual appearance is actually a source of “abundance” or a new paucity. In kari edwards’s poem, “This leftover disruption thing,” being “disassembled,” rather than being reassembled within predicable constraints (“in the contours of contours”), is the demand, a prelude to the emergence of a fiery “impossibility”:

we want the freedom to be disassembled freedom from connotations of the nearly possible being intoned in the contours of contours

[…]

we want a combination of the impossible dreaming substance moving in fire because it’s a condition in a substance moving in fire (321)

Citing “critical feminist theory” as being “about challenging gender norms” as arbitrary “social construct[s], D’Lo, a Tamil Srilankan Los Angelean, writes in “Growing’s Trade Off” about being “born female” and “experience[ing] life […] through a masculine-identified female body” (117). D’Lo has “a vagina,” has “not taken male hormones,” and does not “identify as woman or as man” but “as transgender” (117). As for j/j hastain in the poem “Is a mistaken carcass a place of memory?” the question “Is there ever anything new to be written of our genders and sexes as they develop us?” is to be replaced by lovers’ intention “to enshrine masteries of fusion. […] This was the last page of the diary. This more than woman or man or ______” (252). The change from passivity, being “developed” by outside forces, and active “enshrinement” of a mastery of self-styled integration, is most crucial here.

For second-generation New York School poet Eileen Myles, the power of language can challenge foundations of male domination by giving women access to the tropes of male privilege, thus permitting the satisfactions of woman-as-man and man-as-woman. In “My Boy’s Red Hat,” she asks: “Am I a man writing the poem of the woman. I was born male, that was my feeling. I looked at my body and apparently I even demanded a penis as a child. It’s what my mother reports. Do I have one now. Yes it’s language. This ropey poem […] Maybe a poem is the famous detachable penis” (176). Or as TC Tolbert puts in the poem “(ir)Retrieval,” “That the body which is my body is indeterminately” (459).

Another form of resistance to definition and advocacy for complex visibility can be found in Aimee Herman’s “Poetics Statement”:

How to define the need to not be defined. On Monday, see Poet in tie and vest. On Tuesday, feast eyes upon cleavage and whale fat lipstick. On Wednesday, Poet is packing, Poet is binding, Poet is gender concealed. […] On Saturday, Poet is the slash. On Sunday morning, Poet is M and in the evening back to F. (43)

And here is the opening prose-block of Samuel Ace’s “I met a man”:

I met a man who was a woman who was a man who was a woman who was a man who met a woman who met her genes who tic’d the toe who was a man who x’d the x and xx’d the y I met a friend who preferred to pi than to 3 or 3.2 the infinite slide through the river of identitude a boat he did not want to sink who met a god who was a tiny space who was a shot who was a god who was a son who was a girl who was a tree I met a god who was a sign who was a mold who fermented a new species on the pier beneath the ropes of coral (431).

The passages from Herman and Ace’s texts both utilize catalogs to emphasize a proliferation of differences. Herman’s catalog promotes de-definition through shifting images that each appear to encourage a (temporary) definition, except for the ambiguous “slash,” which connotes both androgyny and violence. On the other hand, Ace enacts a kind of regress that is thrown off when the reiterated verb “was” is changed to “met” (going back the verb linked with the initial “I”) and later to a trope of tic-tac-toe, then designations of chromosome patterns. When the “man” meets the “woman,” is he meeting the women inside himself who has “met her” own male “genes” or genes that code the possibility of his being female? Is the process of gender reassignment like tic-tac-toe, but with x’s and y’s rather than x’s and o’s? The nonce word “identitude,” coupled with “river,” somehow sounds more fluid, psychologically appealing, and socially enabling than the historically troublesome “identity.” “Identitude” is both a river and the “boat” on which the “I” “slides”; the fact that the “friend” whom Ace’s speaker “met” wants the boat to stay afloat seems a call for “the infinite slide” to continue indefinitely, perhaps to the point where “a new species” is “fermented.”

If the destabilizing of “identity” into a more welcoming, capacious, transgender “identitude” parallels the destabilizing of monological, wholly instrumental language into poetic discourse sliding toward a free play of signifiers, Jake Pam Dick’s “Jake’s Translit/My Transmanual” is a prime example. Taking up where Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and other pun-happy literati, philosophers, and psychoanalysts left off, Dick exfoliates her manual of the intertextual while ringing changes on the poet’s first name:

’C ’Cos all Jake now. Except some Franz: free man or French! Jake, Jacques, Jack. Like every transman jack of them — no, like one. Truth jacking logic, speeding off with it. […] But don’t just jack off: jake off. Give a hand job to another or novella. Incestuous poetics: do brothers, sisters. A Jake in the books should be deviant, non sequitur! Transmanual vs. Immanuel. […] Expel, eject, ejaculate, I jake. Females do it also! How sex re-enters. I would enter the girl! Or the boy! Crushed-out sex with other texts: bastardizations. Translate’s not enough; translit is better. With God licks and riffs. Plus a slit. (275)

Can “some Franz” (Kafka, maybe?) — now solely in a textual realm — become a “free man,” no longer enslaved to his celebrated repression, thanks to the verbal guitar-jacking/jaking of the “I jake’s” “licks and riffs”? Notions of “truth” are said to (hi-)jack “logic,” which, otherwise, could be “translit”: “lit” (literature, illumination) across artificial boundaries, as well as the “slit” of the “tran” that can “jake off.” Such an associative logic is not “translation”; to “translate’s not enough” if it asserts itself pseudo-authentically as seamless, “pure” transition from one language to another. On the other hand, sexual intensity engendering textual “bastardizations” fulfills a “transmanual” categorical imperative for ejaculation, whether “manually” induced or otherwise. Not only the determinate male entering the determinate female in a “sequitur” eventuating in “legitimate” offspring, “sex re-enters” in numerous combinations. And “a jake” enters the “box”/“books” only to self-“eject.”

Although this review so far has focused on poets’ treatments of transgender issues, numerous poems on other subjects appear. CA Conrad in the visually subtle poem, “it’s too late for careful,” marshals a rhythmically and rhetorically intense critique of US policy in the Middle East in relation to corporate irresponsibility at home:

killing babies is less threatening with the politically correct militia

vices for the vice box for wards of the forward state who like different things to kill alike

we CANNOT occupy Wall Street but we CAN occupy Baghdad (91)

The noun “militia” suggests those to the right of the Tea Party; the term “vice box” indicates the icy doctrine of then Vice President Cheney, probable author of the Bush Doctrine. Also note the play on “wards” (those orphaned by US policy), the “forward” march of overly “forward” (imprudent and rude) military intervention, and the pairing of “like/alike” suggesting a link between a preference for violent action and multiple targets lumped into the same category. Conrad repeats the reference to the sabotage of the Occupy movement later in the poem: “we CANNOT occupy Philadelphia but / we CAN occupy Kabul” (92); “we CANNOT occupy Oakland but / the ghosts will occupy us” (93).

Various poets in the anthology address racial/ethnic transformations in language as well as LGBT approaches to “troubling the line.” Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán’s poem “Cycle undone” envisions a highly specific homecoming:

[…] If the Red Sea could part once more, and Palestinians return home. Who knows what we would do if we owned our own lands? Perhaps live or be free, rather than simply on sale. If we could feel waves wash up against us, and not be covered in sludge and salt, hypodermic needles (we wash out with bleach, take to the exchange), if dirt were sacred once more. And water clean. If we were more than a preposition, conjunction, something to bring others together. […] (29)

In “A Queer/Trans Womanist Indigenous Colored Poetics,” Bodhrán declares: “I use writing as a tool for collective and individual healing and decolonization, a way of rescripting our lives as queer people of color, mixed-bloods, and women of color, as people who know what it means to struggle, daily, multigenerationally” (34). Bodhran perceives “the mythic and magical in the quotidian as potential antidote to our malaise” and holds that “historical trauma is revisited through the particular site of the body; and (trans)national metanarratives and discourses are negotiated through periods and zones of contact” (34).

Similarly, Micha Cárdenas, who engages in digital technology work on behalf of Mexicans seeking to cross the US border, finds “magic” in the “queer” uses of computer systems. In the poem “We are the intersections,” Cárdenas expatiates upon the late Chicana lesbian Gloria Anzaldua’s poetic/theoretical deployment of the “borderland” trope: “We are constantly navigating the violence of borders of all kinds, / skittering across earth pinging satellites that never correctly know / our exact locations, / for they never know how many kinds of thirst we feel” (395). Cárdenas insists that individuals’ and groups’ multiple subjectivity is a most powerful resistance to the erection and policing of borders: “I am the intersection, of too many coordinate systems to name. / We are the intersections, and we exceed the borders placed on us” (395).

Taken as a whole, Troubling the Line manifests numerous “intersections” that vigorously “exceed” many “borders” imposed on the categories “transgender” and “genderqueer” and those who partly or thoroughly “inhabit” those categories.

A review of Meredith Stricker's 'Mistake'

Rosmarie Waldrop chose Meredith Stricker’s Mistake as the winner of the Caketrain Chapbook Competition in 2011. “Chapbook” seems a misnomer for the seventy-eight-page book, and the collection finds itself at the intersection of the most interesting work today in contemporary poetics. It is innovative without being apolitical, experimental without compromising emotional resonance, and uneasily categorized.

In notes for the book, Stricker writes that Mistake “was set in motion by the ongoing full-moon practice of ryaku fusatsu, a repentance or forgiveness ceremony in the Zen tradition, paying attention to accidents, overprints, flaws, the discarded, the unwanted, the cast-off.”[1] Brian Teare, in his blurb on the book’s back cover, calls Mistake “a brilliant book about reading, particularly about reading events that could be construed as accident or chance.” Through a fiercely intelligent engagement with psychoanalytic theory (Freud), Buddhist philosophy, evolutionary science (Darwin’s tangled bank metaphor), labor (The Gleaners), plotting of history and art (Walter Benjamin’s Archives), interpretation of vestige (Gustaf Sobin’s Luminous Debris), and mythology and memory (the Orphic Hymns), the meditation engages readers through structural virtuosity, stellar visual innovation on the page, and a sharp attentiveness to language in the fusion of various lexicons: historic, artistic, scientific, and philosophic.

Barbara Guest in “Poetic Statement: The Forces of Imagination” writes:

In [a] state of suspension the art that is created is infinitely susceptible to new shapes because no shape can be regarded as final. No form is safe when the poet is in a state of perpetual self-transformation, or where, as Hegel suggests, the artist is in a condition of infinite plasticity.[2]

In Mistake, Stricker embraces a variety of shapes through which to defy certainty. The condition of “infinite plasticity” in the artist’s work demonstrates the teeming, dynamic, and interconnected relationships between body, mind, text, and land.

A quote from Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life fringes Mistake’s table of contents and begins the book: “the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make … have a meaning and can be interpreted” (7). The first angle from which Stricker approaches the mistake is thus a psychoanalytic one. Stricker quickly establishes that to know the human being’s slip or mistake, we must interpret it. She asks how we measure the human slip or mistake without imposing our own ideas of right or wrong, about behavior or action, through interpretation. Beginning with Freud alone might destabilize the answers. And what can we really determine about the human subject with individual subjectivities at play?

The first poem of the collection serves as a guide of sorts, asking what it is possible to know:

(9)

With scattered, bracketed, and converging text, Stricker conjures the binary blink of the twenty-first-century Internet age. Stricker points to spatial considerations, a global arena inside of which we are at once closer to one another and more distant. With tongue, ink, or computer screen, we program our surroundings. We place and displace language like a woman pulling out and placing inside rings in a jewelry box. Rings of course operate here both as noun and verb, conjuring both visual and aural image.

Visually and sonically, Stricker moves outward from suburbs to stars and the surface of the moon where “earth spins spine spins” (9). From spins to spine, this dizzying caesura returns us from stratosphere to the body. The piece is an apt embodiment of the book and places readers within the rich, emotional landscape of a pained, postmodern world.

The question of who the radiant director is arises too in the piece. The radiant director is for one a reference to fire — one of many in the book. One interpretation, from a Buddhist standpoint, could be as reference to the three poisons that often drive human beings. “‘Everything is burning!’ said the Buddha, ‘Burning with what? Burning with the fires of greed, hatred and delusion’ (Samyutta Nikaya 35.28).”[3]

1. “The Book Is Heisenberg”

The first of Mistake’s seven sections is entitled “The Book Is Heisenberg.” Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, determined our observations have an effect on the behavior of quanta. To know the velocity of a quark we must measure it, and to measure it, we are forced to affect it. The same goes for observing an object’s position. Uncertainty about an object’s position and velocity makes it difficult for a physicist to determine much about that object.[4] By way of the section’s title, Stricker suggests that we consider a “mistake” within the realm of science, where science’s processes are as fallible as those of psychoanalysis.

In the first piece, text as art object appears, hovering in the middle of the page:

(15)

The mashup arrives just after Maurice Merleau Ponty’s epigraph: “We must consider speech before it is spoken” (13). Considering speech before it is spoken is to see speech and language as the mind’s swarm: as knowable as unknowable, nonlinear, variable, capable of mistakes.

Here you can discern text behind the text more clearly than you can in the book. The clearest word emerges at the top. But is it “born,” which might suggest joining this world, or “horn,” which would suggest the noise we make?

Stricker illustrates multiple narratives, or multiple strands of ideation, even with a simple mistake. At the bottom right-hand side of the page is a more linear progression. Whether or not the two lines serve as a translation or transliteration, the two lines point to human error. They even instruct us how to deal with the most mundane or childish errors like spilling milk. But these are somewhat nonsensical instructions when they tell us to wash a book in milk in order to correct a mistake.

The section’s second page then steers us from breakfast table to sky, traversing life from the biosphere to outer space:

(16)

Using phrasal repetition allows Stricker to play with meaning, as one proceeds through the poem.[5] With the repeated contact of “stars” with “foreheads” and “hands” and “inner ear,” Stricker also conjoins atmosphere to earth, body to stars. The “stars are Being / barbed wire in stars” indicates that the activity here is not some utopic stargazing venture. Existences are at stake. Something ominous is at play when stars are barbed. Further, barbed wire in stars hint at human beings’ use of land. Outer space is just another jeopardized frontier. At the end of the piece, Stricker encourages us to listen to what the stars have to tell us and even intimates the human body’s connection to stars. We are, after all, stardust.

In this section’s last piece, as elsewhere, Stricker works with the idea that a human being is a text too in the section’s last piece. Traffic is “humanity surging out the boundaries of its own skin” (17), and “just as leaves fall and translate the forest, chaparral, grassland,” “no street adheres to its past self” (17). Leaves of books and leaves on trees connect book, body, and street. We are multitudes bursting within, weaving histories across the land and through text.

2. “Mistake — An Evolutionary”

“Mistake — An Evolutionary” begins with a page entitled “TANGLED BANK,” which is followed by a passage from Darwin’s Origin of Species that contains the term. The title of the page and quote call attention to the figurative possibilities of the tangled bank. After the Darwin quote, Stricker writes:

(19)

Stricker puts human, bee, science, and artful expression in contact with one another. This is not merely a conflation of human and animal/insect. There is a meditation on what constitutes a body and sentient being. Phylogenetics, as defined in the online Biology Dictionary, is as follows:

The study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices. The study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices.[6]

Stricker brings the study of genetic connection across groups of organisms to the fore, elevating the importance of change to data in such studies. Etymologically the word phylogenetic derives from the Greek phylon [tribe] and genesis [origin]. Error is contextualized with human beings across the evolutionary timeline. In our “adaptive improvisational helix of altered phoneme plans,” language is adaptable, error-prone and not without the power to impact other living things. Error, like a bee swarm, gathers around the human body. Then, as if by something more like vultures than flying insects, shards (like glass) of meat are carried away.

The next page of the section juxtaposes Dante, the hunters of Cueva de la Manos or Chauvet, and Plato’s allegory (22), where the “cave” of Dante’s Commedia and Plato’s shadowy walls seem materializations of scientific experiments themselves.

Throughout “Mistake — An Evolutionary,” words are struck through and amended, offering not only a translation of what has already been written but a multiplication of sound play as “aphasic side-effects of living / in human weather” continue a “musical cerebellum loose / slipped euphoria / could be another word wool / particular, self existing” (23).

In the last two pages of “Mistake — an Evolutionary,” Stricker intimates the violence of language and mistakes. We “mistake plunder for pleasure”; we “mistake oil for grail.” We “mistake money for monet”; we “mistake faith for … fake.” We “mistake rapture for capture / captive, capital, capsized” (24). Neo-imperialism, commodification, religious hypocrisy, and ruthless global capitalism are evoked while “the ferocity of darkness seeps through” and “death is the stain we cannot live / without” (25). The tangled bank is as much about the evolution of species here, as it is about negotiating the gulf or ruin with song.

3. Waste products

The first poem has repeated lines, the first of which is: “the coast of Japan is thirteen feet closer to us” (31). The piece possesses similarities with “[stars are being]” discussed earlier and gestures to Fukushima and other catastrophes natural and manmade. Heaven is a rumor and a disaster (31). Words like split and wake are repeatedly juxtaposed with phrases such as “heaven is a bestseller,” “heaven is / jesus with sea green eyes,” and “my god is an ocean” (31). The poem points at the unfortunate tendency of our citizens to eye the paradise that is waiting on the other side rather than to protect the wonders that exist right in front of us. Repetitions serve as litany, as means of connecting humans in time, and as emphatic statements to wake up. This piece puts not only the land in conversation with bodies but also interconnects those bodies across the planet. Formally, though, this piece is different than “stars are beings” from the first section. Repetitions are disrupted. Coding is undone. Waste in the tangled bank is untangled.

In “Reactor I.1 / I.2 / I.3,” body, land, mind, and text are shoved together, written in black on white, written in red, written upside down, and elided. The piece nods not only to a singular disaster but all such disasters (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl). Interesting that Stricker chooses to utilize double, rather than single, strikethroughs on the first page of the piece. On the second page of “Reactor,” Stricker writes:

(33)

Broken in different lines, and sustained across the page, Stricker repeats: “what they call garbage is closer to liberation” and “there is no away we can throw things” (34). Garbage is alone, homeless, set aside, present.

In this “one tiny book,” we are asked to look at the way natural disasters inhabit memory and the body. As Leslie Scalapino writes:

A poem may place [sounds, conceptual shapes, and events in the outside] together. As such one’s conceptions alter oneself and being, and alter their one being outside. The individual (and any individual instance) occurs as reading. As: while, alongside, and being (reading is an act).[7]

With right justification, text upside down, the word “mistake” in red, Stricker pushes language in several directions for reading to be such an act.

With all the work Stricker has done to put land, bodies, and language/art into conversation, the waste is defined as garbage and polluted land as much as it is defined as what stays and gets thrown away on the page. “Waste Products” seems to ask if a book, however inexact or amiss, can make a difference or cause its own reaction. Will it go into the garbage, too? How is it a mistake? How is a book waste? Is this book, like an exploding reaction, a mistake too? Is the book complicit with human error? How are we complicit?

4. “A Burning Thing”

The fourth section opens: “I will not be smoothed out / fur, roughened / shies away // articulate waste / matter / scattered” (39). The I unsurprisingly has human and animal qualities and “shies away” from scattered waste but refuses to be “smoothed out” or silenced — at times approaching destruction with ferocity and at times turning inward. At times there is the ability to speak of such waste, and at times there are no words. The speaker is “articulate waste” but not “matter,” as matter is struck through.

“A Burning Thing,” because of its placement after the previous section, emerges from the waste. The “thing,” a breathing thing but also a haunting thing, appears as whatever our culture objectifies or commodifies or manifests through greed, delusion, and hatred.

If there is “no ‘away’ we can throw things,” as the previous section attests to, then what is the burning thing? It is the unmarketable word, the spoken word, the testimonial that burns. A meditation of burning thing becomes a personal matter of the humanimal alive on the land, experiencing the devastation and articulating it with song.

Stricker writes, “who will find you? Thrown // away // in fullness // of life // pissed away” (39). The cycle of affirmation and negation is illustrated with elided text and erasure by way of text struck through. What follows is an important moment for the book:

(40)

The map is supposedly the non-commodity, yet the non-commodity is the thing shrinking and tightening, reflecting what is marginalized, ignored, or silenced. “Entire breathing worlds with people and their languages / animals and /greenness” are vocalized, even as the powers that be attempt to devalue or ignore them. Stricker reintroduces those worlds and sets the burning thing alight, allowing us to recognize destruction. But because a burning thing will only glow so long before it’s gone, Stricker illuminates temporal limitations for sentient beings and land, even as the powerful “arrange their strategic/world of red dust other ‘high value targets’” with rooms full of “sports-bar dinner faces frozen” (41). At the section’s end, Stricker synthesizes a meditation on the burning thing with language:

(42)

By the end of the section, we are asked to look at what is made of words, rather than what is made so by words. And what is made of words burns in “flame-throated letters,” “vowels [that] fill our throats,” in the “clattering row of eucalyptus” (42). Letters at the beginning struck through are re-inhabited. Letters “see” us and allow us writing and reading modes through which to interpret ourselves. Languages and silences comprise a matrix of simultaneous beauty and difficulty, denial and testimony.

5. “Black Stone”

“Black Stone” begins with the following Rothko epigraph: “I would rather confer anthropomorphic attributes upon a stone than dehumanize the slightest possibility of consciousness” (45).

There are seven poems in this section, three to ten lines each. All the pieces are right justified, with underlined titles of biosphere, the letter, black, stone, lens, mute, and white. The space occupied by living organisms, language, yin color, earthly material, tool for representation, silence or silenced individual, and yang color. One poem, “the letter,” explores the materiality of language in addition to a broader sense of language across beings:

(47)

Text is found in the precious resource of water, is scraped dry and articulated in art. The word in Hebrew for bee is etymologically related to the word of God. This is significant, because language is of the body, in life and in death. As “living ones” pass through this life, so do bees (the word) pass through this too. There is of course the earlier link between science, bees, humans and language in “Mistake—an Evolutionary.” But besides that, “letter” ends ultimately with a question. What do the bees think we are (or what does the word think we are)? Are we “flowers or meat/or something in between” (47).

Throughout “Black Stone,” Stricker humanizes the possibilities of consciousness, concretizing the abstract. This bears consideration because Stricker examines not only individual consciousness but also the broadening consciousness of a culture and the way it views its land, its money, and its fellow beings. And Stricker does this with compassion. This section is a reminder of the always changing qualities, the imperfection, and the interconnectedness of living things. “I love you like ochre,” she ends; “I love you” (50).

6. “Orphics”

A seal rises up out of the sea at the beginning of “Orphics”; the speaker of the poem barks to it like a dog. This is a moment of levity, apt for a section that meditates about death but speaks largely of this life.

“The Gleaning of Fields” is a significant piece for this section and for the book. Gleaners of course are individuals who pick at already reaped fields for odd remains or leftovers. Just after Stricker arches Orpheus over a field, a prose block of chemical compounds, a litany of odd remains and leftovers related to laborers, appears: residue of methyl bromide (ozone depleting chemical), malathion (pesticide), naled (insecticide), copper hydroxide (a product of smelting). Stricker gives the environment human qualities: “wetlands, aquifers, jetstreams” are identified as “the veins” (59).

This is not to oversimplify what Stricker is doing here. Neither here nor elsewhere do Stricker’s efforts seem focused on creating a narcissistic anthropomorphism or some pat conflation of nature and humankind. Poetry provides, as Scalapino relays in “Eco-logic in Writing,” a mode through which to see “plains of action of people and natural phenomena at once … all times exist separately at once, present-future-past” (63).

For several of the pieces, Orphic hymn fragments serve as not only points of departure but also a sort of ongoing palimpsest. In fact, there is often the feeling when reading this book that there are at least two, or more, ideas happening simultaneously. Text lies on top of itself: “fractal Ionian shards” and “ghost letters” (63).

7. “There Was Wilderness”

“There Was Wilderness” begins with an epigraph from an Orphic hymn: “Quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink” (65). It is impossible not to think of the fragments of Sappho, the Orphic hymns, and, in contemporary letters, the work of Anne Carson in the opening poem of “There Was Wilderness.”

(67)

The gaps that the fragments and columns create are informative. These push the reader to discover meaning. In excavating layers of past meanings, Stricker foregrounds the temporal. Text fragments speak to the transitory quality of language and human life.

There are many ways one can read the piece through columnar arrangement. Throughout the section, as in this poem, wilderness is language, and like the body broken by land or in some ways unable to speak. How a body ages and dies (68) is once again put into conversation with the land: “what death might be white echo from below” (69).

8. “Fallen”

The last poem in the collection is “Fallen,” where title conjures spirit and body. The poem begins in the material, with algebraic exponent. But Stricker writes it incorrectly, I assume purposefully, as X11-17 rather than 1/X6.

(70)

We are told by the speaker that we’d be “recognize[d] … anywhere across crowded … causeway.” The book is a dream; “the book is a Heisenberg.” That is to say, the book is related to uncertainty. Blanketed in uncertainty, the question of what mistake meanslingers long after putting the book down.

With “Love through thorns” and the supplication to “Blind Mercy,” Stricker reminds us that with all the constraints of the embodied and mortal being, the spirit stretches out with possibility. The last word of the book is one more mathematical mistake before words of the body and in speech act, with “salt / on our lips” — all of us radiant directors with “Fire Throat / still seeking.”